Options development and appraisal for the New Forest

We commenced the ODA process at the river basin catchment (RBC) scale (level 2 planning) in order to look across all the wastewater systems in the river basin. This enabled us to consider generic options that could work at the catchment scale, as well as those specific to a wastewater system. 

The generic options are grouped into those that help tackle the risks at ‘source’, those that help to improve the wastewater system ‘the pathway’, and those that protect or mitigate the impacts on the receiving waterbodies, ‘the receptors’.

This process helped to identify the types of options that could be used individually or in combination with other options. The generic options which have been screened as the type of options to progress further in the planning process for each wastewater system can be downloaded using the links in the table below.

We held meetings with partner organisations to build upon the list of generic options relevant to the wastewater system. As a group we identified and proposed options to take forward into the evaluation stage to consider the benefits (positive and negative) and costs of each option. The meetings generated a long list of ‘unconstrained’ options. The options proposed were to tackle the drivers and causes of risks identified during the Problem Characterisation stage of the DWMP.

The appraisal stage involved evaluating each of the options in two stages, firstly to screen out unviable options to leave a set of ‘constrained’ options, and then a second stage to reduce the list further to leave only potentially ‘feasible’ options. The process for evaluating the benefits and how we have taken the environment into account is set out in our Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) Scoping Report and the SEA Progress Report.

Our preferred options are set out in Investment Needs tables for each wastewater system. The links to these tables are below for the five wastewater systems in the New Forest that we took through this option development and appraisal stage of the DWMP. The accompanying map shows the location of the proposed options within the wastewater system.

Please check the DWMP glossary for any unexplained acronyms.

The options and investment needs are not committed funding but an identification of the needs for funding. We will include these options in our future business plans as part of the Ofwat periodic review of Water Company funding to secure the investment needed to implement these options.

Note: The areas highlighted for customer education in the investment needs maps are indicative areas of likely focus, as they were derived from historical incident data.